CHAPTER 20

Lanri was in paradise, to what degree she was aware of it. Exhaustion, afterglow, and a gentle spell had come together the night before, and she’d fallen asleep curled up in Seeker’s arms with a smile on her face. The bed was warm, and comfortable, and in that bed she dreamt.

She dreamt about walking through beautiful halls of marble, gold, and copper. A place saturated with the aura of magic, and love, and passion. It smelled of sex and wine, and she knew she belonged there. It was a place like a temple, or the palace of an empress of old. People and creatures more beautiful than she would ever be able to fully appreciate came and went, looking at her like she was one of them, all of them happy to see her.

She dreamt about a vast garden, with swimming pools, colorful flowers, and hedges for privacy. With a sheet laid out in the grass, where Seeker was waiting for her with a bowl of cold and fresh fruit by her side, and desire in her eyes. Seeker, who protected, and loved, and guided her.

Seeker, who was shaking her awake.

Lanri’s eyes fluttered open, and it took all of the effort in the world to focus on the red-headed angel that had her by her shoulders. “W–whath… What’s going on, Seeker?” She managed to ask.

“I have to go.”

That got Lanri’s attention. It sent a pang of dread into her gut, and she forced her eyes open the rest of the way. “What?!” She asked, not bothering or caring to hide how deeply she resented the idea of that. As she looked at Seeker, she noticed she wasn’t naked anymore, or even wearing her customary cardigans. She was wearing her full suit of armor, shiny gold and silver plates covering the clothing underneath. From so up close, Lanri realized the chest plate had Ishara’s sigil embossed on it.

“Just for a little while, Dear,” Seeker assured her.

“N–no,” Lanri said, and she grabbed Seeker’s wrist. “No, you have to–”

“I have to go, Lanri,” Seeker insisted. Despite her words, and the urgency in her voice, she sat down on the bed beside Lanri. She peeled her fingers off of the gauntlet, and then stroked her cheek. “Something that shouldn’t be happening is happening now, close to the coast. Something dangerous and bizarre, that Ishara needs me to stop and investigate. I simply can’t not go.”

“Then take me with you!” Lanri blurted out. She didn’t want to stay here, alone, in a city with a baron that wanted her destitute or dead. “I–I can help!”

Seeker gave her a look that could only be interpreted as pity, and sighed as she shook her head. “You can’t. It’s so far away, it would take me a month to take you there. And it’s too dangerous, besides.”

Lanri tried to think of something, anything, to keep Seeker from leaving. “T–then–”

“No!” Seeker firmly told her. “This is what I do, and what I’m for. I wish I could just devote myself to you completely, I really do, but I’m still a Heartwarden, Lanri. I have to abide by my mandate. You can’t imagine how strong that compulsion is, or how hard it was to even stall long enough to just warn you I’d be gone for a while.”

Lanri thought about that. Over the last few weeks, she’d learned a lot about just how irresistible a compulsion could really be. “Come back quickly,” she said, after a moment.

Seeker smiled at her, and nodded before she leaned in and kissed her. A simple pressure against her lips that spoke only of love, not of the passion or possession they sometimes conveyed. “And you. You’re going to stay in the monastery no matter what, do you understand?”

Lanri nodded. “I will,” she promised as Seeker got up from the bed, and took two steps back from it.

“Just behave, be polite, stay inside, and try not to get into trouble.”

“Be careful,” Lanri told Seeker, and she meant it. She tried to picture what Seeker might have to deal with.

Seeker smiled and nodded, then said “traversez.” The spell made Lanri’s chest tighten, and she shivered as she watched the world distort. In an instant, Seeker seemed to twist and melt like a wax statue. The colors that made her so recognizable shifted, and blurred, and rearranged, until she blended into the wall behind her, and seemed to be painted out of the picture of reality completely.

And just like that, Lanri was alone. Perhaps a minute of frantic interaction, and then Seeker had gone. She was off to vanquish some foe while Lanri was left to make sense of it on her own. She looked around the room for a while, trying to take stock. She saw her clothes had been folded and put on the foot of the bed, alongside another outfit, and her crutches had been laid there, too. She crawled towards them.

She picked up the new clothes first. There were just three articles to them, she realized. Slim shorts, sandals, and a knee-length, short-sleeved dress. All three were white with coppery stitching, but made of different materials. The sandals were leather, the shorts were cotton, and the dress felt like satin. She bit her lip, and smiled when she picked it up, reminded of just how nice it was to get gifts from people you like. The dress was brilliantly smooth, and a little shiny, and she was pretty sure she would freeze to death in under an hour if she went outside wearing it.

But, given that she’d been ordered to stay inside anyways… She giggled and shrugged, deciding she wanted to look nice for Seeker whenever she got back. She slipped into the shorts first, one leg at a time and quickly realized they hugged her figure almost perfectly. There was only enough slack in the fabric to allow her to move, and unlike every article of bottom wear she’d ever owned, there was no lace in the waistband to tighten it. Just a single button.

These have to have at least been tailored, Lanri thought as she buttoned the shorts shut, and slipped on the one sandal she had any use for. It fit remarkably well, too. For a moment, she looked at the other one, the one for a right foot she didn’t have, and wondered why Seeker had bothered with it. Maybe she thought there only being one would hurt more? She used the crutches to stand up, then headed into the bathroom.

Looking into the mirror, she learned quickly the shorts were as flattering as she’d suspected. Everything was snug and slim without digging in anywhere. She loved them. A little revealing, though. She was pretty sure she’d be better off wearing a fig leaf for modesty if she planned to work up any kind of sweat.

She turned around, and made her way back out of the bathroom. Standing on the tiled floor in there with her crutches made her just a little nervous compared to the far grippier carpet of the bedroom. Just as she crossed the threshold into that bedroom, though, she noticed something. Seeker’s nightstand had a little book on it.

That was beyond interesting. Had Seeker left it there for her to read? Was it a diary? She had to find out. She went for it in a beeline, throwing herself down onto the bed, and snatched it up in passing. When she opened it, she found it was full of sketches, annotated in scribbled runes of divine language.

“Me, the Seeker,” read the only text on the very first page, in the corner of a quick, but very pretty picture of Seeker, wearing a simple dress. Her eyes were looking straight at Lanri, and she had a little book in her lap. Presumably the same one Lanri held now. A self portrait.. She looked younger, somehow. The same face, but less weary.

Lanri started to leaf through the pages. Scenes of dank caves, and mystic creatures, and cramped streets, and strange plants. She stopped on one at random. It was a drawing of an angry, very big man with dark skin, and a threatening tattoo on the side of his neck. From the perspective of the sketch, he was looming over her, with a spear extended down towards her that extended just beyond the page. “Traverse,” the annotation said.

She kept going, all the way to the last pages, stopping occasionally to look at the most interesting drawings, but giving all of them at least a few seconds to savor them. Pictures of beings she’d never seen herself before struck her. Dragons and pegasi with vast wingspans, eclipsing the sun or moon, and bored kings on thrones, and–

Me.

She stopped browsing, and lingered on the picture. It was dark, and gloomy. A fire, in front of a wagon, with her in the center of the image, bound to a wheel while gagged, half naked, and staring directly at the viewer while ignoring the two figures Seeker had drawn only in crude, harsh lines. “Saved,” the drawing was named. It made her a little uncomfortable, knowing Seeker remembered finding her like that in such detail, and she quickly decided she would have preferred not to have seen it.

Eager to move on, she flipped to the next pages. They were filled with far nicer images of her. The divine word for Dear and expensive was carefully written, just next to the centerfold. She was asleep in the best one and biggest one, with smaller depictions showing her with a doe-eyed grin, or unashamed curiosity.

When she flipped to the next page, she gasped.

She was looking at yet another picture of herself, and quickly realized it must have been drawn during the night. It was her, when she was blacked out, with a slack jaw, oblivious smile, and tears and drool running down her face. It was as enthralling as it was disturbing.

She looked behind her, at the spot on the carpet she had been when she had been when she came out of it. With the drawing in hand, it was easy to envision what the real thing must have looked like, and she tried to imagine how Seeker had felt about it. Going back through the sketchbook, there weren’t any pictures of someone else that were even remotely like it. Loving or respectful expressions, sure, and the closest thing to it that she could find was one of two people. Two naked figures seen from behind, one androgynous, and one a woman, seemingly sitting on the edge of a bed and talking to each other.

But nothing like this. Nothing like her. Nobody gawking at Seeker in oblivious adoration. Nobody seemed to even be in here more than once, let alone covering several pages. Was she that special to Seeker, that it had taken her almost a thousand years to do something like this with someone? That couldn’t be. Even she had had two lovers by now, and she still twenty-eight, even if that would only be the case for another week or so.

________________

Despite Seeker telling her she wasn’t destined to be a priestess of Ishara, the clothes she’d chosen for Lanri absolutely made her look like one. Once she was finished getting dressed, she’d left their room at the top of the monastery, and very carefully began to make her way down the stairs in search of breakfast. Seeker had helped with that the day before, and doing it alone was, frankly, terrifying. Despite the solid stone handrails built into the walls, she was scared she’d slip, hit her head, and be cold by the time someone found her.

But, with great care, she’d made it all the way down. The people were still as beautiful as yesterday, but nowhere near as friendly. Without Seeker there, she got far less attention. A look or two, and a few polite smiles. What little there was came mostly from the older ones, the priests and priestesses that she knew lived out their retirements here, preaching a lot but practicing little. The avarice and desire she’d seen yesterday just didn’t seem to come out as much for women with missing limbs as it did for Heartwardens.

It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to be looked at like that; She had her eyes completely set on Seeker. But it was a little unsettling to get less attention than she used to in Astoria, in a monastery of Ishara of all places. This was a place where she’d expected she would have to swat people away at every corner.

She sighed quietly, and followed the route she and Seeker had followed yesterday, limping towards the dining hall and looking around as she did so. She looked at some busts as they passed them, taking in what detail she could. Important priests of Ishara, she assumed, though, frankly, she didn’t really care. Oh, she cared intellectually, alright. She went to school to look at statues of long dead people, after all. But she just couldn’t bring herself to care about them now. The pictures in Seeker’s sketchbook were simply far more interesting.

She wondered if it was the only sketchbook. If Seeker only added things to it rarely, or if she’d already exhausted dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. She wondered how many fantastic things Seeker had seen over the centuries, and if she’d decided some of them weren’t worthy of a drawing, while she filled several. She wondered if she’d committed an unforgivable violation of Seeker’s privacy.

That was something she would prefer to have thought of before opening the book, or not at all, she quickly decided as nerves crept into her. Just because she sees my thoughts doesn’t mean I should try to pry into hers. She wasn’t worried Seeker would be particularly angry about it, Seeker was too good for that. But she’d probably not be happy about it, Lanri now realized. She hadn’t seen that book before, and Seeker had left in a hurry. She’d probably forgotten to put it away, not left it there for her idiotic mortal to peruse like a picture book at a library.

“Are you okay?” Someone asked.

Lanri jolted slightly, and her head snapped up in the direction of the voice. It was the beastkin priestess from yesterday, she realized, though she couldn’t remember her name. She swallowed, and nodded.

“Well, you don’t look it,” said the priestess as she came closer, and put the back of one of her hands to Lanri’s forehead. “Y’don’t have a fever. Are you nauseous?”

“Not particularly,” Lanri said, a little confused. “Just nerves.”

“Must be some nerves…”

“Lanri,” Lanri offered, picking up on the pause. “My name is Lanri–” She cringed a little when she got the intonation wrong, and realized she was out of things to say already, other than the surname she was dancing around.

“Lanri…” The priestess urged.

“Vattens,” Lanri reluctantly said.

The priestess considered that. “Well, come along, Lanri Vattens. I’ve got just the thing for nerves. The roof!”

“The roof?” Lanri asked, and she raised one of her crutches. “I don’t really get along with stairs these days.”

“Oh, none of that! We’re in a monastery here. I’m sure that if you trip and fall, one of the gods will bother taking pity, and catch you.”

“I really don’t think I should take the possibility of that for granted,” Lanri tried, but otherwise didn’t resist when she was pulled back in the direction she came from.

________________

“All the gods, I hate… fuckin’ stairs,” Lanri said with a gasp as they passed the corridor she and Seeker had a room on, and her gaze lingered on it as they kept going. “Shouldn’t I get some more clothes before we–”

“Nonsense,” the priestess assured her, nudging her forward from behind. “I told you yesterday, there’s a greenhouse up there. It’s plenty warm. We’re not even going outside.”

That’s good.

Soon, they were at the top of the final flight of stairs, at a small, heavy looking door. The priestess fished around in a satchel she wore across one shoulder for a moment, then produced a big, coppery key. There was some rattling, then a click, and the door swung open to let in a lot of light, and, surprisingly warm air that carried with it the scent of peat, mint, and tomatoes.

“I told you, plenty warm.”

Lanri walked past the priestess as she held open the door for her, and into the greenhouse. It was a big glass room, with a wide walkway down the middle, and smaller ones branching off from it. Between the walkways, plots of soil were divided into neat subdivisions by strips of stone, and on the opposite end of the largest one, Lanri saw a door that led out to the rooftop proper.

She slowly wandered into the glass garden, sticking to the center walkway with care. To her left, she saw mostly plants she recognized. Tomatoes, strawberries, and peppers stood out as the most abundant, and as overwhelmingly out of season.

To her right, though? That was full of strange and bizarre plants. Most of them smelled nice enough from the distance she was keeping, she supposed, and she most certainly intended to keep her distance from them.

“I think this place is wonderful,” the priestess said. “So full of life, soil, sun, and rain all coming together to allow the things we need to grow.”

Lanri nodded, but struggled to take her eyes off nearly any of the plants on the right side of the greenhouse. She didn’t recognize anything she saw. “I don’t think these are things we need,” she said.

“Good eye,” praised the priestess. “No, these are… Let’s call them local specialties.”

Lanri scoffed, despite herself. “No, they’re not! Nothing like this grows anywhere near here.”

“Very good eye,” the priestess corrected. “How do you know about that?”

“I grew up on a farm a few miles north,” Lanri said without thinking about it. She briefly looked out of the greenhouse’s, well, anything, and oriented herself. After a moment, she pointed about 120 degrees left of where the sun hung in the sky. “There… ish,” she added.

“A farmer’s daughter, and somehow I’ve never met you? That’s hard to believe.”

“I’d rather not talk about it. I’ve been gone for a long time,” said Lanri as guilt about running away with Faron began to bubble up.

“Fair enough.” The priestess dropped to her knees, and patted the tiles next to her. Lanri looked down at her pristine white dress, and decided against getting it dirty with a shake of her head. “Definitely been a while since you’ve been on a farm, alright,” the priestess said, not quite managing to hide her judgment

“Hey, I…” She started, but trailed off. She didn’t much care to justify herself to a priestess who seemed set solely on teasing her. “Nevermind.”

“Good. Take a look at this,” said the priestess, as she pulled a little tuft of moss from the ground. She crushed it between two fingers for a moment, gave it a smell, then put it on some paper she pulled from her satchel.

“It’s… moss,” Lanri noted.

“Not just moss.” The priestess paused for a moment, rolling the little tuft up in the paper. Then she squeezed it just hard enough for some juice to soak into it, and stick it together. “Deséschez,” she intoned, and Lanri watched as the little tube of moss and paper shrank by half, and shriveled up. Then, she offered it to her.

Lanri hesitantly took it. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Well, I promised to settle your nerves, didn’t I? Stick one end in your mouth.”

Lanri squinted. She tried to drill into the bovine priestess with all of the skepticism and doubt she could manage. “What is it?” She asked.

“Oh, don’t be so boring!” Urged the priestess. “I’m a priestess of Hayer, growing things on the roof of a damn monastery of Ishara. It’s not poison, toots. It’ll help, I promise!”

“Right now, I’m more nervous about this than–”

The priestess snatched the little roll from Lanri’s finger with a sigh, and a roll of her eyes. “Follows a Heartwarden around, but is scared of some herbs, remarkable,” she mumbled as she stuck one end in her own mouth, whispered “allumez,” and inhaled just as a little flame appeared on one end.

“Oh, you smoke it!” Lanri said, and the priestess nodded, holding her breath as she offered the little roll back to her. “You could have just said that, you know,” Lanri huffed as she took it. “You promise it’s not poison? Seeker’ll probably kill you if it is.”

The priestess nodded, and drew a little circle in the air as she spoke yet another spell. “Serment.” The word came out with a cough and a lot of smoke, but when it faded from her ear, the circle remained. That was a hugely important gesture, Lanri knew, and yet this priestess was doing it while sitting on the ground, smoking something. “I, Mirabelle Rivas, Daughter of Plenty, swear to my lord Hayer that the material I am offering to Lanri Vattens is not poisonous, and can safely be smoked or ingested in the quantities I am holding.” The little circle flashed, then disappeared.

“You swore an oath… for that?” Lanri was honestly grateful, though. She knew how important oaths were, and now she’d been reminded of Mirabelle’s name.

“I did, now take the damn thing, you fucking baby!”

“Fine!” Huffed Lanri, as she took the… roll, and after bringing it to her mouth, took a breath through it. The smoke tasted vile and stung her lungs, and she immediately started coughing. “Daray, stomp on it, that’s putrid!” She cursed, as she took several deep breaths, and she felt a rush of vertigo. “What is that?!”

“Dazeweed,” replied Mirabelle.

Lanri’s eyes went wide, and on pure instinct, she threw the roll away. “That is fucking poison, you…” She blinked several times as she lost the train of thought. “Y–you… uhm…”

The beastkin giggled, as she picked up the roll from the tile it had landed on, and took another drag. “It’s fine!” She promised. “Nobody’s ever been hurt by smoking some dazeweed.”

“Some mercenaries I hired… uhm… made me chew it, and then took my clothes off, until Seeker stopped them.” Lanri thought about what she’d just said, and realized she probably shouldn’t have.

“I’m going to be completely honest now, Lanri,” promised the priestess whose name Lanri was now quite proud to be able to recall. “If I’d known that, I would’ve picked something different for you.”

Lanri couldn’t help but giggle at how blunt and dryly put that was. “Oh, you would huh?!” She said, then burst out laughing. “Y–you wouldn’t have given a Heartwarden’s… Whatever I am–”

“Consort.”

“–Consort, thank you, a fucking… puff of… dazeweed, if you’d known… that stuff I said? Mirabelle?”

Now it was the priestess’ turn to laugh. “Give you this thing, to suck on, like it’s a demon of Anguish’s tit made manifest to spite you? No. I don’t think I would have.”

Both of them laughed for quite a while.

Once she calmed down, Lanri looked around for a moment, and, when she spotted a bench, hobbled her way towards it. The priestess did the same, and somehow looked even less steady on her feet than she felt. They both sat down on it with a satisfied sigh, and Mirabelle offered the roll again. “Oh, no! I’m… quite happy where I am, not yet worried I’ll fall through that glass ceiling on my way to the moon, thank you very much.”

Mirabelle giggled, and took a last puff from the stick before flicking it into a bucket of water. “That’s fair enough,” she managed as she let the smoke out. “They must have given you… a lot to get you that far gone, though.”

Lanri giggled, and nodded. That whole night was a lot less painful to think about now, now that there was a haze of daze around everything. She giggled again, now at the phrase haze of daze.

“So, where’d your Heartwarden run off to, kiddo?”

“Kiddo?! How old do you think I am?”

Mirabelle shrugged. “Ask me when you want to know how long ago an orchard was planted? Then I’ll be able to give you a number. You’re young, alright? Two thirds my age, tops.”

“Fair enough,” said Lanri, as she looked up, and smiled at the pale blue winter sky. “She went off to the coast. Something about danger, and… Heartwarden things, and… mandates.”

“Those mandates are a bitch,” Mirabelle agreed. “The only thing more important to an angel than their mandate is their patron god. E’rything else, themselves, the other gods, mortal lives, they’re all secondary.”

“I’m not complaining,” Lanri said, as she looked at Mirabelle. “That mandate made her save me from the… Y’know, vast amounts of trouble I was in.”

“Oh, I’m sure she did! The way you look at Her Grace, I’m sure she made a real impression while doing it, too.”

“You’ve got no idea. I was… tied up, completely out of it, and… And suddenly this fucking angel appears. Big cocky grin on her face, shiny armor, competence incarnate. She just kind of had to look at those two, and they just stopped what they were doing.” Lanri paused, and giggled as she recalled the overwhelming sense of awe Seeker had radiated. “I was very impressed.”

Mirabelle looked at Lanri, appraisingly, and scratched one of her ears. “And I guess you impressed her, too.”

Lanri looked around for a while, not quite sure what to say to that, and hoping the greenhouse full of fruit and alchemical ingredients would help. It didn’t. She knew she’d impressed Seeker. Seeker had told her she was proud of her, and she was obviously special to her. But she didn’t think she could articulate that to Mirabelle. Instead, she just nodded.

She felt grand. The fuzz around her thoughts was noticeable, and remarkably pleasant. It made her curious what the rest of the plants on that side of the greenhouse did, and why they were even there. She decided to ask as she looked at them. “Why… Uhm, why is there dazeweed up here?”

“Oh, child! You’ve no idea how many potions even a single priest of Ishara goes through,” Mirabelle giggled, as she got back up from the bench, and extended a hand to Lanri.

But we just sat down.

Reluctantly, Lanri took Mirabelle’s hand, and let her be helped to her feet. The world seemed to keep moving just a hair longer than it should have, and she stumbled a little, but she soon found her bearing, and followed the bovine priestess back to where she’d pulled up the small tuft of dazeweed.

“The dazeweed’s a personal favorite. Helps you unwind, let your guard down a bit… I hear some of the acolytes like to chew or smoke a little bit before doing… whatever daunts them, I guess.”

Lanri nodded, then pointed at a plant at random. It was a little bush, with small, deeply purple flowers, clustered together. It reminded her a little of Lavender. “What’s this?”

“Oh, that’s norlille. If you’d ever heard of it, though, it would have been as purple passion, or maybe his flower.”

“His flower?” Lanri asked, as she thought about it. “What, does it only do something to… Oh, I think I know what it does.”

Mirabelle nodded, and she slowly uncurled a single finger to point up at the glass ceiling. “For a long time, I’m told.”

“And what about this?” Lanri pointed at a bundle of thorny stems that each ended in beautiful, pink, two-petaled flowers.

“Deadly in the wild, just a little dangerous in here. Ishara’s bait..”

“What does that do?”

“Poke yourself on one of the brambles if you want to find out?”

“I’d rather not,” said Lanri, as she took an extra step back from that plot of soil.

“It’s anesthetic,” Mirabelle explained. “In the wild, these stems spread out in vast networks along the ground. You step on a few of them, your foot goes numb, so you trip and fall onto a lot more, and then there’s nothing you can do to defend yourself when something inevitably comes along and–”

“I get the idea!” Said Lanri, horrified by the mental image of falling into a weave of thorns, to die of exposure or… whatever found her.

“Anyways, it’s used in poisons by assassins and the like, and for pain relief. Apparently they like both, here.”

Lanri giggled. “They probably put that stuff in the numbing salve, huh?”

Mirabelle nodded. “Other stuff too, I’m sure.” Lanri shuddered, partially at the thought of what kind of sex would involve paralytic potions, and partially something else. She felt a little like a breeze had chilled her. “That appeals to you, huh? You definitely belong here, then.”

“No!” Lanri blurted out, despite not quite managing to stop herself from thinking about Seeker paralyzing her with a spell, back in Astoria. She couldn’t but wonder what she might use a spell like that for now, now that they’d grown so intimate.

“Uh-huh,” said Mirabelle with amusement plain to hear in her voice. “The lack of appeal is really showing in that blush, and the slight sway you’ve got going on in your hips.”

“Well, excuse me for not having as much of a tolerance for… uhm…” Lanri paused, the word eluding her. Instead, she simply pointed at the patch of moss they’d smoked, “that as you do.”

“Speaking of tolerance,” came a third, faintly raspy voice, from the stairway door. Lanri turned to look, and saw a human figure with dark hair and brown skin in the doorway. “You’re certainly helping everyone in the monastery get used to the smell of dazeweed at this rate.”

“Oh, crap,” mumbled Mirabelle. “I forgot to close that…”

The third person rolled their eyes, and stepped out into the glass garden. They were flanked by an acolyte on either side, both of which Lanri thought looked like they only barely met the monastery’s rules on a minimum age. Unlike them, the priest wore a medallion of Ishara around their neck shone in the sunlight, and they wore a loose robe over what Lanri assumed were very tight, form-correcting undergarments. There was something deeply familiar about the priest, like Lanri had seen them before, but just couldn’t quite place where. “It’s fine, I exaggerate, of course! I was just showing these two lovely new things around, and my tour would have brought them here, anyways.”

“Oh, is that the dazeweed you told us about?” One of them, a young woman with pale skin and coppery hair asked.

“I do think it is, yes,” said the priest with a grin. “But, you should really ask priestess Rivas about that.”

“Who are–” Mirabelle trailed off, and looked mortified as the two eager acolytes rushed towards her. “I don’t–”

Lanri giggled. If the bovine priestess called her kid, these two who couldn’t possibly have seen twenty summers yet were probably really taking her reserves of the tolerance of youth for all they had. “I love your ears, they’re really pretty,” and “you look really strong,” stood out as particularly brazen flirtations, and she could see by the dismayed look in Mirabelle’s bloodshot eyes that they were entirely moot.

“If she didn’t want to attract the attention of the acolytes, she should have opened a window while smoking,” the priest said from behind Lanri. She turned to look at them, and they cocked their head in a faintly skeptical expression. Lanri still couldn’t place what was so familiar about them. They were remarkably nondescript, in a paradoxically memorable way. “Speaking of smoking, you look like you could use some rest. Would you like me to see you back to your room?”

________________

Half of a continent away, in the harsh winds and salty air, Seeker twirled her sword around in a flourish, and invoked a spell to clean it as she stepped over the slain siren. “Purgez au feu.” The spell drew on the power Ishara had delegated to her, and brilliant pink and gold flames purged the engraved blade of blood and viscera.

Ahead, a young man laid in a little pile in the corner of the inlet. He was dressed in the the soaked uniform of a midshipman, and if it weren't for the subtle rise and fall of his chest, and the intermittent clouds of breath, she'd think he was dead.

She reached down with her sword, and flicked the fabric of his tunic aside, to reveal his mostly covered face, and was surprised to see a soft smile on his face, and a chain collar wrapped snugly around his neck. It was obviously of Ishara. The pink tint of rose gold and its general aura both told her as much. It was probably what was keeping him calm, rather than panicking about freezing to death.

She sheathed her sword in her gauntlet, and knelt by his side. She put her hand on the collar, ready to pull it straight into nowhere to free him from it without worrying with whatever mechanism sealed it on, when she thought better of it. First, she said "Sechez," calling on the power Ishara had delegated to her to dry his hair and clothes. He giggled softly as she waited for a moment as the spell took effect, then pulled it into and out of nowhere in one motion.

She looked down at it, appreciatively. Whatever it was, it was powerful. Very powerful. "Now, how did you wind up with this around your neck?"

The young man blinked several times, and clutched his sides. "W–what?" He quietly asked, and Seeker just gave him an understanding smile. The question had been mostly rhetorical, anyways. "She… She… How did I get here?"

"I'll wager just about anything the sirens kidnapped you," Seeker explained, and she helpfully pointed towards the siren she'd just felled, still bleeding where she lay.

"Y-yeah," he mumbled. He moved to sit upright, and winced a little. "I… I think I remember that. I feel lousy."

"I'm not surprised." Seeker looked down at the collar again. Whatever it did, it apparently wasn't clear in the boy's mind. That was probably for the best. His eyes followed hers down to the collar, and he ran a hand along his throat. I guess you do remember some of it.

"Was I… wearing that?" He asked her, earnestly. Seeker simply nodded. "Thanks for getting it off, I think."

"No problem," Seeker flatly said. She was genuinely happy to have been able to help him, but right now this collar was a lot more interesting than he was. "There's a village a few miles north. I'm sure you're not the first shipwreck survivor they’ve taken in.”

“But I’m not a–”

She silenced him with a shift in posture, and a pointed look. “If I were you, I’d save what really happened for the admiralty, and keep things as simple as possible until you get there.”